Jacqueline Osherow - Böcker

With Dead Men's Praise, Jacqueline Osherow gives us her fourth and most ambitious collection yet. Her hybrid inspiration ranges from Dante's terza rima, to free verse, to biblical psalms, while always keeping the voice of casual conversation. In the book's centerpiece, "Scattered Psalms," Osherow takes on the Hebrew psalms, the lyric heart of both the English and Jewish literary traditions out of which her writing comes. Combining the self-mocking inflections of Yiddish jokes with the pure lyric inspiration of biblical poetry, these poems range from Italian hill towns to Los Angeles contemporary art installations to the vanished Jewish world of the Ukraine, from imaginings of the future to recovery of the past. Her distinctive voice becomes a seemingly impossible fusion of the sublime and the down-to-earth.

In Poem for Jenne, which opens Jacqueline Osherow's ambitious and challenging newcollection, a neighbor has planted larkspur and delphinium in the poet's yard and is tending them hoping to bring color and light into a household stricken by personal tragedy. As the bright blue, star-shaped flowers bloom for a second time, the poet writes, ""earth's reaching for her heavens, I for words / or any chink of rapture I can claim."" The pervasive theme, in this poem and throughout Whitethorn, is that human suffering may be irremediable, yet in nature and language one may find a key to unlock the mysteries of sorrow.Osherow searches for that cipher by exploring a range of suffering, from the personal to the historical and cultural. In the poem ""Orders of Infinity"" she visits Treblinka and, in her inability to count the stones or quantify the real loss of the Holocaust, ponders the impossibility of imagining the unborn generations of the victims' descendants, an infinity of lives not lived, ""undreamed daydreams, mute conversations, ungratified indulgences, failed hints...""In Whitethorn, a book of enormous scope and emotional intelligence, Osherow unflinchingly examines the pain of her own personal history and courageously probes the greater mystery of evil and suffering in the world.

In this collection, Jacqueline Osherow gives us perfectly formed, musical poems that glide between the worlds of art, architecture, literature, and religion. Traveling through Europe, Tel Aviv, and New York, Osherow observes with a keen eye the details of objects -- beautiful buildings and ancient artifacts -- and of the conversations and interactions she has with others. Finely constructed and always engaging, her poems uncover the startling truths of memory and coax our own forgotten moments from the recesses of the mind.

In My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple, Jacqueline Osherow considers expressions of spirituality from cultures all over the world and investigates previously unexplored aspects of her relationship to Judaism and Jewish history. While some poems reflect on practitioners of self-imposed isolation, from the monks in Fra Angelico's frescoed cells to Emily Dickinson to the Kotzker Rebbe, others explore topics as varied as architecture, geometry, faith, war, and genocide. Osherow finds beauty in Joseph's dreams, the euphony of crickets, and the gamut of symmetries on display in the Alhambra. The scent of lindens serves as a meditative bridge between Darmstadt, Germany, alien and unnerving, and a familiar front porch in Salt Lake City, where the poet freely engages with the natural world: ""Don't worry, moon; we all lose our bearings. / You don't have to rise. Stay here instead. / I'll spot you; we could both use an ally / and rumor has it disorientation / is the least resistant pathway to what's holy."" Osherow takes readers on a journey as tourists and global citizens, trying to find meaning in an often painful and chaotic world.

The reach of Divine Ratios is global, ranging from Tang Dynasty China and the Florentine Renaissance to contemporary Baltimore, post–World War II Berlin, and the landscapes of the Mountain West. The speed and mobility evoked in this new collection by Jacqueline Osherow are not only physical—a traveler's movement in a crowded, thrilling world—but imaginative, and its poetic idiom is no less varied, as a breezy conversational tone serves as a counterpoint to traditional form. With striking juxtapositions of natural and cultural wonders, this enrapturing volume asks, what is the right proportion—or "ratio"—for living in a world of such splendors, horrors, and possibilities?